One of the most obvious shifts in presentation over the past three decades has been the adjusting of the frame to new technologies. The frame has long been determined by the technological limitations of the tools which created the images; throughout the history of cinema, a wide variety of aspect ratios, projections and organizing elements have waxed and waned in popularity although the roots of these developments have traditionally been based in response to some major technological shift. Cinemascope, for example, which emerged in the 1950’s with a projected ratio of 2.35:1, was a direct response by film studios and theatres to the emergence of television and its rise in popularity. More recently, we have seen a shattering of standards and formats in cinema projection, from the resurrection of 3D cinema to .gif videos, computer screens as televisions and online streaming services which can be displayed any number of ways. Erwin Panofsky, in his seminal essay Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures, states that cinema is a ‘technical invention which gives rise to the discovery and gradual perfection of a new art.’ (Panofsky, 1936/2003, 69). Within the form of each medium, audiences have developed a substantial visual language which generates meaning and understanding when applied by the filmmakers: semiotics, hermeneutics, psychology, sociology and art theory contribute some of the vocabulary, but as the medium evolves and new formats are introduced, so too does the language which accompanies it.

Pudovkin (1954) spoke of the compositional elements within a frame as a canvas which ‘must be organically enclosed in the boundaries of its space. The same is true of the work of the film director. No movement, no construction is thinkable for him outside that piece of space, limited by a rectangular contour and technically termed the “picture.”’ (81) This is echoed by Anne Friedberg, who describes the screen as a ‘closed system.’ (2009, 241) It is ‘a primary container for inset secondary and tertiary frames that may recede in mise-en-abyme, but also converge to reunite within a grander but still bounded frame.’ (ibid.) There is, to be sure, a separation between its contents and its viewers, the elements within it, as well as a impression of of what other elements -real, virtual or imagined- lie beyond its boundaries.

Audiences are no longer fooled into believing that the images they see are real: it has been a long time since we genuinely feared that trains would crash through screens into crowds. Today, most consider the cinema to be a window into a fictional or manufactured world; the modern viewer understands that what they are seeing is a representation of reality in some form, which provides enough suspension of disbelief to engage with the images. However, as it is with all manner of artistic mediums, experimentations with form have been explored since the very beginning. Cinema is no different.

Aside from a very small number of experiments, the cinematic gaze has been exclusively monoscopic. The frame, which has obviously undergone significant evolution since the 19th century, has maintained a singular perspective despite the divergent formats. What has shifted with each format is the viewing rituals and characteristics that determine the nature of our interactions with the image. Movie theatres, for instance, are a place of formal ritualism: we choose to enter into a darkened room, our sole focus is the giant screen before us, we are there for a specified time and interact with the image is well defined ways. Television, on the other hand, provides an informal communication and democratization between the viewer and the content - the channels are there for us and we choose what we would like to watch. The newest additions to this family are computational and mobile formats, which begins where television ends: they expand the ‘database’ of content by presenting only that which is tailored to the individual user and requiring near constant engagement. Perhaps the most significant differentiation between these and traditional  formats is that computational and mobile formats encourage multiple perspectives and contexts because of their forms. To put it another way, one could say that cinema requires us to move to a defined space and time in order to be ‘transported,’ television delivers the content to you at home, but mobile media brings it all with you, wherever you happen to be: no matter where or when, you are able to find some relevant content for you, by you or about you.

While there are many other art forms which have explored theories surrounding multiple perspectives, cinema has remained relatively singular in its physical presentation, relying instead on modes, montage techniques and semiotics to explore multiple perspectives. Despite its perceived newness, works that incorporate multiple frames as narrative devices have been evolving since the beginning of the medium. Recent examples include Mike Figgis’ often-cited Timecode (1999), which divides the image into quadrants so to be able to simultaneously follow characters and their paths as the interact. David Hockney has used photographs, polaroids and video in his multiple-perspective works since the mid-1980s; Zbignew Rybczynski worked extensively with multiple exposure and optical printing techniques in the 1970s. Georges Méliès, working in Paris around the same time as the Lumière brothers, created mattes and multiple exposures to manipulate space and time within the frame; these fantastical elements provided the foundation of all special effects work since and were essential to developing the cinema’s narrative capacities on the whole.

Avant-garde filmmakers, working with each technological development, produced works which challenged audiences and pushed the entire industry forward. One such project, amongst many early days of narrative cinema, was Napoléon (1927), directed by Abel Gance. Intended as an epic in every sense of teh word, at its longest screening it is said to run over five hours. The length of the film is not necessarily its most memorable trait, however: Gance produced long sequences of the film using the ‘Polyvision’ system. Essentially, Gance used three cameras to record certain sequences, including a series of battles, which were shot simultaneously and presented them as one ‘complete’ image (Nowell-Smith, 1996, 11). The centre screen would carry the bulk of the ‘film’, where the screens on either side would either be used to show additional footage and dramatic information or as a part of a widescreen triptych (Coe, 1981, 144). While split screen, anamorphic and panoramic projections had been well established by time Gance photographed the film, no one had produced a work which manipulated the screens themselves to improve the storytelling experience.

Napoléon was only one of many experimentations with storytelling structure and presentations which drove the industry -and the art form- forward. Greenaway (2010) points to a cycle of evolution which pervades different forms of art, which undoubtedly can be applied to cinema:

• the Progenitor: the originating generation of artists who make the initial innovations with the medium by developing, experimenting and reflection on influences from existing disciplines and ideas.

• the Consolidator: the artists who perfect the form and bring it into its own.

• The Grandson (who Throws it all Away): they who reject the perfection and turn against the roots of their medium. They reject the rules and standards established by the earlier generations and break with the medium’s tradition. As a result, they are often the Progenitors of the next evolution in the medium.

In the European tradition, one can look to progenitors such as Gance, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Geroges Méliès, Fritz Lang, Man Ray, and a host of others who shaped the medium by folding the artistic movements of the day (particularly Impressionism, Cubism and Dadaism) and experimenting with every aspect of it which has resulted in the visual storytelling language which we use today. Following that, filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini developed sophisticated works which expanded ideas developed during the first generation into a standalone art form. During this second wave, technical improvements  (lightweight cameras, for instance) were made which were immediately applied by the Grandchildren: Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Ken Loach, Norman McLaren and even those directors who had gained prominence during earlier generations decidedly rejected ideas and tropes of early cinema in favour of more liberal experimentations with cinematic form, montage and artistic expression. We find ourselves today with a healthy mixture of filmmakers who find success in  of ‘traditionalists’, such as Martin Scorses, Christopher Nolan, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen working alongside David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Danny Boyle, Quentin Tarantino and Terernce Malick, whose works are decidedly more ‘experimental’ by comparison. Modern cinema has seen the rise of the technological innovators such as Alfonso Cuarón, David Fincher, James Cameron and the Wachowskis, whose technical expertise has, more than ever, made the frame into a window through which worlds, real and imagined, could be realized.

With the evolution of the television screen in the 1950’s and the introduction of the graphic user interface (GUI) in the 1960’s, the context by which we viewed the cinema screen (and as a result, the stories themselves) began to change. (Friedberg, 2009) Prior to the introduction of GUIs, computational interactions were, at best, unintuitive but direct: computers during the 1940’s and 1950’s required the use of punch cards or other physical types of inputs to function and users relied on printed versions or simple interface displays. In 1969, Alan Kay presented the first ‘windowed’ interface for a computer where,

‘both [windows or viewports] imply an aperture, a visual porthole onto the graphic expanse of a screen that simultaneously represents and masks the workings of the computer’s code. In this form of “object-oriented” programming, anything could be an object - a number, a word, a picture - and hence it was assumed to be a multimedia display.’ (Friedberg, 2009, 225)

This shift in interface design, combined with an algorithm developed by Dan Ingalls in 1975 which allowed processors to maintain simultaneous ‘windowed’ interfaces, which in turn allowed a diversification of tasks which could be concurrently operated yet independently controlled. This was the first iteration of the modern computer interface. Today, We find ourselves with a myriad of GUI-based operating systems which present incalculable permutations in an infinitely variable hierarchical order. The GUI masks the code which operates ‘behind the scenes’ but manifests itself as the images, icons and symbols on a screen. One major difference between GUIs and other screen-based media, Friedberg argues, is that in order to generate any meaningful interaction -or to receive any response from the operating system- one must remain in constant contact with the processor through the GUI, whereas television may only require certain points of contact (i.e. the remote) but will return information -in the form of shows, commercials, news, etc.- without the same constant prompting.

Despite the advances in mobile digital technologies of the past decade, video interaction on mobile devices have remained relatively unchanged when compared with other mediums. Watching video content on an iPhone or iPad, for instance, is still very much modelled after desktop computer interactions or television screening. Despite having touch screens where any possible interface could be designed, presentation standards and interactions are limited to the same controls one would find on a television remote control: play, pause and stop. Video streaming systems such as Netflix do not deviate from the standard linear timeline which can be found on any other playhead-based interface: while the entire surface of the screen can be programmed for any type of input, the only way to manipulate the timeline remains as though it was designed for a mouse and pointer interface. When timeline scrubbing possibilities are presented, the physical limitations of the smaller screen size and preview frames do not permit the level of control that one expects to have: it is, for now, much more difficult to make precise adjustments on a timeline than with a mouse or proper remote control. Greenaway’s exalting of the remote as the beginning of true interactivity pointed to an evolution of interface and control, yet -to date- this has not really come to pass. It is, however, ‘a symptom of a much wider phenomenon.’ (Greenaway, 2010)

David Lynch, although a strong proponent for digital acquisition, is strongly opposed to small screens as ‘acceptable’ for viewing cinematic works: ‘Now if you’re playing a movie on a telephone, you will never, in a trillion years, experience the film. You’ll think that you’ve experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.’ (2008) Lynch is speaking to the traditional theatrical experience in a cinema, where an audiences’ attention is maintained by the scale and focus of the screen. Greenaway, in opposition, points out the absurdity of the frame as the only way to see a film: despite our everyday manoeuvrability through a three-dimensional world, we are ‘cutting off half our experiential capacities by sitting in a theatre … The world is not [a parallelogram], no matter how you try to make it that shape, and in a curious way, it’s very, very delimiting.’ (Greenaway, 2010) Perhaps mobile devices will yield new possibilities in adjusting the window through which we see stories.

Theatres measure screen size based on subtended angle (Allen, 2000, 1): the perceived angle of the screen relative to the average field of view from a specified location within the theatre. By Dolby’s standards, a screen which ‘subtends a horizontal width of 35, 40, 50 or 55 degrees’ (ibid.) is optimal for audience engagement as the screen perceptively grows larger, the audience will be more inclined in feeling like being a part of the film itself. One of the more obvious issues with viewing content on a mobile device is the substantially smaller screen size, limited by the device itself. While the actual pixel count is very close between the formats - current SMPTE standards call for 1920x1080 pixels for high definition (HD) television, 2048x1080 and 4096x2160 for digital cinema projections and Apple’s 2048x1536 for iPad Retinas - the actual screen size dramatically affects the way in which the filmmaker must consider composition and montage techniques, as well as the affect of the reduced screen size on the audience.

Inasmuch as Lynch is speaking of cinema in the sense of a theatrical experience, Wolfgang Hürst (2008) presents three parameters which hold some potential for changing the way that viewers experience media content on their mobile devices. The first is content: Hürst suggests ‘that being able to get an individually controlled live replay on your phone with which you can see, for example, immediately replay and judge critical scenes or re-watch outstanding scenes on your mobile’ (2008, 2) would entice viewers to engage more actively in viewing content if they could control what they see. The second is to encourage active participation in the selection and viewing of the content. ‘Why not adapt the production process of the video track for mobile video as well, for example, by using different camera angles or additional cameras which show a perspective that is more suitable for smaller screens? Why not add zooming information to the video signal in order to enable cellphone providers to adapt the content to the respective screen sizes more easily?’ (ibid.) The third parameter is the the actual interface of the device itself: ‘Approaches for interactive video browsing which support flexible and intuitive navigation within a video have been developed for video replay on laptops and desktop PCs. However, they have not made their way in to mobile video players yet, although the mobile context and different usage scenarios make them even more important and useful here.’ (ibid.) Hürst presented these arguments in 2008, although it has taken some time to arrive in actual streaming players. In February, 2014, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) presented a live stream video feed for users to watch the Sochi Winter Olympics in real time and also provided a timeline with clickable highlight points (i.e. goals, penalties, Canadian competitors, etc.) for reviewing. The videos were organized as a database: one could select specific moments and replay them in real time as they were recorded. While there were no options to view congruent camera positions, the ability to control the playback and view the highlights in any order introduced many viewers to the potential of accessing content when they like, how they like, and in what order they like.